Errata & More Errata

Another batch of 4e errata went live on Tuesday. The document includes this statement at the beginning:

“We know some if you feel as if the update process has become too agressive. Rest assured, we hear your concerns. The next few months will see a continuation of the current roll-out schedule, but after September and the release of the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials line, we expect to pull back the process.”

Well, count me into that group. For me (and I speak only for my particular case) it’s becoming a bit much to catch up with. I can’t imagine those of you out there without the character builder. How do you do it?

My group and I are not weekly players. We are certainly not power players looking to build the best and most optimized combos. My players don’t hit the optimization boards looking for that “broken” stuff. The truth is that even though I have a D&D blog and what not, we are just casual players, with very limited time to play.

More importantly, my players don’t really care about erratas, updates, and clarifications (oh my!). They just want to get together and roll some dice while talking smack and eating pizza. For the past two years almost, I’ve been printing out the erratas, updating my books, cutting and pasting over my DMG and PHB and all that good stuff. And now I’m still getting updates to the conditions from PHB1?

Nah. I think I’m done. In all honesty, powers are going to be fixed in the character builder anyway, so I’ll jut pick and choose what rules updates I apply, if I remember to. The new aid another rules seem good, as well as the 3d movement stuff.

At this point, 2 years in, if my players don’t really give a crap, and we don’t run RPGA stuff, why should I? I’m not in this to be hassled with updating my stuff anymore as I have been in the past. I’m in this for fun. All this errata is becoming tedious for me to manage, when my players don’t even care about it. And worse than tedious, boring, and boring is never good.

I do however, see the need for this for all you organized play folks, or those of you with a heavy play schedule and rules intensive group. I actually envy you for being able to enjoy the hobby as much as you do. I wish I could, but my reality is unfortunately different.

So to finish this itty-bitty rant, let me know when a fully errata-applied 4e rule book goes on sale. I’ll just pick that up.

This is an inevitable side-effect of the exceptions based design they’ve used throughout this edition, exacerbated by league play. It’s annoying, but on the other hand, it prevents having to do a 4.5 revised edition.

Nonetheless, for home play, errata hardly matters. At least, it wouldn’t, if everybody had the same information in front of them. But those using the Insider tools will have different information than the people using the printed books, so a decision has to be made as to how things are going to have to work.

For Third Edition, we simply kept with the three core books for a very long time. We didn’t even upgrade to 3.5 until the end of it’s supported life-cycle. Now we mostly play Savage Worlds, but when it comes time for D&D again, it’ll be Pathfinder core, and that’s it. It keeps things simple.

I deal with it by only keeping track of the changes that directly affect me. In other words, if it’s not a cleric errata or not an errata to one of the items my PC carries, I don’t care.

I’m not sure how I’d feel about it as a DM. I do have some history with poorly-balanced encounters, and I know I feel it’s a wasted session if encounters are too easy, so I do see the metagame benefits of a healthy errata schedule.

I feel the same way. Back when i started with 4th Edition i kept my books updated and applied each new errata, even though it was kind of boring. Now with a half a ton of 4E books in my shelf this has become a very time consuming process. Time that I rather spend PLAYING or doing something else. I know rules updates are needed and I’m OK with that, but ANOTHER Errata for the core books? Come on…

I guess I’ll buy the revised core books, saves so much time (and looks so much better than that patchwork stuff in my books).

I haven’t really “errata’d” anything that wasn’t included in the CB or the additional PHBs. My players, like yours, aren’t power players and one of them still needs me to remind him about his Elven Accuracy, so I really don’t need to worry about anything being overpowered.

I’ll pick up the Rules Compedium when it comes out, mainly because I’d like having a “rules” book close at hand when ruling things, but I know it will include all the minor changes I have probably missed over the last two years.

As a wpn organizer, who keeps track of several of my players characters, its a nightmare. Not only do I have to learn all the changes, re-print characters (one player will now be on his 3rd re-print after 4 errata) and tell the players that their build that was kicking arse is no longer valid, I have to check the versions of any characters that come in from other sources. Some of my players only have the demo of the CB, so their builds don’t match etc. The errata is adding more work on to me…

As I mentioned to you on Twitter newbiedm, I completely agree with you. The biggest issue to me I think is that these changes hit the Character Builder and break characters. So as a DM I’m responsible for keeping up with these changes so I can explain them to my not-so-tech-savvy players. It’s a big pain when I barely have time to construct the campaign itself.

My gaming group definitely fits the description of your own group: “…my players don’t really care about erratas, updates, and clarifications (oh my!). They just want to get together and roll some dice while talking smack and eating pizza. ”

I tend to ignore most of the errata and rely on the Character Builder updates to take care of any of the small changes. For bigger changes, like the new stealth rules, I usually print them out and keep them handy at the table.

Admittedly, I’m kind of waiting for the upcoming Rules Compendium from WOTC. I’m hoping that this book will have everything I need in a single volume, at least in terms of rules.

Really, what do you care if the they errata? I play monthly, in a home-based game. Next time the characters level, the builder will errata their characters. I don’t generally memorize the effects of specific powers of whatnot, and I pull up relevant rules in the Compendium when I have trouble remembering them – so who cares if they errata until they turn blue?

Or are you just having trouble NOT compulsively implementing all of it?

We don’t use errata or the character builder! The stuff isn’t that broken and my players (with the exception of one) hasn’t ever gone and tried to find out if there was a way they could make a one-man killing-machine.

I wish I could get an “urgent errata” list for things that are truly broken. I’m not opposed to implementing errata, but not minutiae that I’ll likely never use and that has no practical effect on our casual home game. On the other hand, I don’t trust myself yet to know what is really broken versus what is merely being touched up for outside cases conjured from the depths of the Char Op boards.

Does anyone know of a compiled list of “truly important” errata somewhere? In fact, I’d love to see that as a blog post here (hint hint).

It’s difficult to ignore the errata due to the Character Builder. All of my players use it—some share accounts—to the point of not really knowing how to create a character without it. To say “we’re using rule X but not rule Y” is troublesome to say the least. Sure, my Invoker can just scratch out ‘burst 1’ and write in ‘burst 3’, but having to remember that every level for a wide variety of powers, *plus* keep an eye out for other powers that have been “errata’d” is a big damn hassle.

I feel very strongly that this sort of errata has no place in D&D. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not the game I’ve been playing all these years,” said one of my players. I don’t mean to sound like a luddite, but for all their many flaws, previous editions didn’t have these problems. Yeah, Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil was broken as hell, but spot-banning was a lot easier in 3.5. We call these updates ‘patches’ in our group, because it’s a lot more like an MMO patch than any pen-and-paper update we’ve ever seen. “Who got nerfed this month?” is the usual follow up to “Patch Day was today!”

Its funny, I was in the same camp as you, newbie, and many of the folks above. I incorporated the previous eratta only because we use the Character Builder and Monster Builder and I refer to the Compendium a lot when preparing for games. It was tiresome and I was ready to be done with the update process, but I didn’t like the idea of everyone referring to different sets of rules at my table.

But with this most recent update, I found that a lot of the things they had addressed were things I remember making calls at the table about anyway. Like many groups, we debated the different interpretations of the charge rules and whether you could charge while climbing or jump during movement granted by someone else’s power or charge while falling and all sorts of other things over the last three years that we’ve been playing 4th Edition. Just last session, our fighter used a daily power that granted a persistant mark (until the end of the encounter) and shortly thereafter was rendered unconscious (the mark worked, she got the critter’s attention). The question arose as to whether the mark would resume functioning when she became conscious again.

Yes, there is a reason why the game is run by a human rather than a computer. And the reason is to have someone who can make intelligent judgments about the way game should work in a way that is fair and balanced. And I’ve never complained about having to do it. But, if the developers can go back and clarify, edit, update, and rebalance, it makes it easier on any group that comes to the game from that point forward.

Of course, the decision as to whether to keep up with the eratta or not is something for every group to make and if you’re having fun, then there is no reason to change. But that is also a good argument for continuing to make D&D a living, evolving game for those who decide they want it that way. If you don’t bother with updates and eratta, those people are out of luck. If you do, they can use it and you can choose not to.

Nothing is more annoying than having a player look something up in the PHB while some one else reads the PHB2 and a third is reading the online errata. I say work with the rules that were published when you started the game, and if you run into something that looks or feels broken then check the errata for clarification; otherwise game on.

Well, I think exactly the same as newbieDM, we all are tired of downloading, printing and stuff all the errata in the books, man, its kinda bored being checking the web page all the time just to check if they have updated or “errated” something else. Forget about it, the only errata I apply is the one on the last chapter of the PHB2 and nothing else. Maybe someday, when they launch the D&D Essentials, I’ll check it, and for my RPGA events… well, I’ll fix it up by my way.
PS. Its not that hard without the Character Builder, you know? lol

Me, I like the clarifications and fixes. I hate having to spot rule on broken things, annoying players and getting into arguments about this or that. In general, it’s better that they fix things instead of ignoring the problem. Specially when there’s an abiguity. And oh were there ambiguities in 3.5, that still gives me the biggest head ache about playing the game.

Over all, I like erratas. Yah they irritate you for a while, but then you incorporate the rules and move on.

The only thing I wish they would do is publish a complete new rules book every quarter via pdf or for free even. Power and item changes instantly go into the builder, I don’t care about those. But rules changes need to be republished in full occasionally.

The rules compendium fixes that, but it’s only once in 2 years, and honestly I rather not have to pay again just to have the rules listed out in a nice revised fixed manner. It should be free, to subscribers at least. Or something.

“I can’t imagine those of you out there without the character builder. How do you do it?”

Ignore them. I check the errata to see if it changes things that I had questions about – we’d been wondering about forcing vertical movement, now that’s clarified. Otherwise, who cares? Yeah, infernal wrath has always been a little sub-par, but you either ignore it or take a few feats to make it useful, and if you do the latter and aren’t in the RPGA, why bother changing?